Walking Down Milwaukee

April 10, 2005

I got an email from my friend Matt today, letting me know about a show of his at Foundation Gallery. Turns out that today was the last day, and when I mentioned this to Chris, he seemed interested in going with.

My intent was to just hoof it down there, and walk down Milwaukee Ave. En route, I figured I’d take some pictures. I also mentioned this bar on Division and Elston called (I swear to god) Slow Down Life’s Too Short. I had been in there once before, with a bunch of coworkers from my old job (this was pre-blog, and I have no pictures for you unfortunately). The exterior of the place looks like a junkyard, but the interior is this sprawling, multi-room mishmash of a bar. And to top it off, there was a ping-pong table there, if memory serves.

I met up with Chris at Santullo’s, where we grabbed a slice of pizza. He’s under the weather today, and battling (yet another) bout of sickness. When I talked to him on the phone, he said he was pretty congested – but mostly because he had run out of Nyquil the night prior. At Santullo’s, he told me that Will had run downstairs to get him some medicine, which he then promptly took. After the fact though, he looked and discovered he had just thrown down a shot of some kind of Cold and Flu PM medicine – the kind you take before bed.

Chris was fine the rest of the afternoon, and didn’t seem to have much of a problem fighting the Cold and Flu medicine. However – I did offer to throw down a shot of it as well, just so we’d be on the same page and I wouldn’t be, like, rushing him or anything.

Let it be recorded here: Chris hogs all his drugs, and doesn’t like to share.

We walked over to Sound Gallery for a bit, and hung out there looking at records. Then, we headed over to Milwaukee and headed down.

Chris, checking out the cars running by on the Kennedy. One of the things he mentioned here was how he loved peeking in at the passing cars, how everyone inside seemed to be lost in their own private/secluded worlds, oblivious to the rest of the world.

Another skull. By the end of today, Chris and I will have stumbled across several instances like this – repeated messages/stickers. Always fun to sort of track this stuff, and see where it’s spread.

There’s a church on Damen that I walk by, time to time. There’s scaffolding all alongside the front of it, and I’ve been meaning to take a picture of it for a while now. Something about churches and construction gets my head going. This is the kind of stuff that would catch my fancy, back in the days when I used to get ideas for poems.

Not entirely sure what this streetsign is for. Indicating that an intersection has one of those circular centers, that you have to drive around?

I spotted a few “Obey” stickers around, and Chris explained to me where those images started. Originally, they were from a sticker that said something like “Andre the Giant has a posse.”

Well, wouldn’t you know it – we walk a few yards, and spot a handful of them, sprinkled along the posts.